Too much centralisation and dominance under Muscat

At their embryonic stage, Labour’s ‘reforms’ in environment and planning are encountering such widespread criticism – not just environmental and social, but even over their frail legal foundations – that it has become clear that Joseph Muscat’s supporters need a redoubtable defence to protect his orthodoxy.

Labour’s unprecedented electoral victory and subsequent nine-seat majority has benefited from much popular goodwill, but it’s this overweening power that requires tempering by regulators, institutions and civil society.

It’s a confusing line-up of political achievements: state-funded childcare, greater equality and gay rights, sit nervously side by side with environmental deregulation and weakened governance.

Labour is a broad church that necessarily requires Muscat and his persona to build consensus at all stages to keep the house together. But 900 days since becoming PM, this pattern of legacy-building only betrays his style of governance – more and more centralization of power in his and his minister’s hands; controlling the institutions through persons of trust; disparaging of critics and independent agents; and more worrying, a discomfort with those who refuse to buy into the political deceit, who read through the script right away.

So how has this centralization of decision-making taken place? It’s a nifty, stage-managed craft that attacks legislation, and substitutes it with the Potemkin village of public ‘consultation’.

Take SPED and the new planning laws. Muscat decreed that the Structure Plan, the island’s planning manual, had to change. The new SPED was rushed through parliament with a deliberate attempt at limiting the input of civil society and the green lobby, which has been unanimously in agreement that SPED only serves to allow increased development inside the countryside and ODZ areas.

Once Labour spurns its chief antagonists, it fabricates an olive branch, stage-managing a public consultation period to allow critics to be as annoying and irritating as they please.

The online consultation on the American University was itself an example. Over 600 proposals produced 169 sites but only 12 (7% of suitable sites) fit the onerous specifications of Sadeen’s mega-campus. The natural park at Zonqor was still declared fit to be taken over by Sadeen, but Labour’s ‘compromise’ demands that the public should be grateful for having avoided the destruction of 90,000 square metres.

Why would we snub foreign investment when the global rich are begging us to hand over our public spaces for a good return? This seems to be the question that the proponents of the Individual Investor Programme, the Barts hospital, the AUM, and the developers’ lobby, want to ask us.

By legal notice, the people who pay €1.15 million for a passport were granted semi-anonymity by having their names published alongside those obtaining naturalization, and then not even with their surnames printed in alphabetical order, but by name so that families of passport-buyers do not appear grouped.

By legal notice, the hospital-related development at St Lukes’s and the Gozo hospitals were exempted from the need of seeking any planning permission, either through normal planning process or through a notification order, opening the floodgates for more environmental abuse by issuing legislation exempting hospitals from Environment Impact Assessments.

By legal notice, government gets wider discretionary power to revise the parameters of the hunting season “for any other season which the Minister deems fit to be of sufficient gravity” when at present, the minister may only revise the restrictions of the season on the basis of scientific advice.

The minister for planning gets to retain even more power in planning by conditioning the MEPA executive chairman’s role, appointed directly by the minister and then also disposed of by the minister “for not achieving the targets and objectives set for him by the minister”.

Developers also get to influence public consultations to propose changes on any new planning policy or plans being discussed, by submitting their comments anonymously, contrary to previous practice.

Evidently, all these money-spinners necessitated undermining the legislation that protects society from the political manipulation of our public ownership of these goods and lands.

The question is: where do you stop? At what point does a nine-seat majority become a free pass to overhaul laws to suit mega-investors’ whims? When you run the state like a business – as was the case in Café Premier’s unwarranted €4.2 million bailout – who truly benefits: the CEO or the customers?

While a modern and progressive democracy demands that decentralisation is the order of the day, we have witnessed a reversal of the legislative buffers we had grown accustomed to.

It speaks volumes of Muscat and his advisors’ dim view of the institutions: the regulators serve power, not the citizenry. But this new orthodoxy already has numerous heretics who are ready to speak truth to power. Muscat’s premiership has reached giddy heights but also new limits that is testing critics, and voters’ patience. The question is how long does he want to keep testing them.